SOURCE: “Introduction: The Inward Gaze,” in Poets of the Apocalypse, Twayne Publishers, 1983, pp. 1-22.

In the following excerpt, Salmon discusses the London literary milieu of the Apocalyptic Poets.

The Literary Scene

“The New Apocalypse was a well organized movement of the continental type,” Kenneth Rexroth writes in his Introduction to The New British Poets (1949). But the Apocalyptic Movement was less well organized than Rexroth imagined. The idea for it grew out of the work of Nicholas Moore (a son of the philosopher G. E. Moore), John Goodland, and Dorian Cooke on the magazine Seven, which published the early works of other writers associated with the New Apocalypse: J. F. Hendry, Henry Treece, Norman MacCaig, and G. S. Fraser. “Fraser I met at St. Andrews, and … when I started my magazine Seven in 1938, he was immediately a contributor,” Moore recalls, adding, “Treece I never met, but I accepted a...